Thank you for the very helpful information. You have truly helped the world.
OK, recently I observed some immoral people in some med forums(namely valuemd) who are running business over prospectives,
so I reflected my insecurity feeling to you too. I am overreacting recently, sorry, you dont deserve it.
... Hi. I'm going to be graduating from high school soon and I go to a very competitive and prestigious high school in the States. I have a polish-american dual citizen ship and I'm polish-Italian. I don't have an Italian citizenship because my grandma was born before women could pass on their citizenship to their children. I speak italian and polish fluently and I plan on going to an English language medical school in Poland. After that I would like to complete residency in Italy. I would like to know how hard it is to get into Italian residency and how do you do it. Thanks for reading this!...
1) If you consider someday to turn back to US, to have your education in a US-based med school gets your chance of residency match 90some%, while its appr.50% for non-US med school graduates. In future, because of the increase in the US med schools, but the stability in the number of residency positions, its expected this chance will lean more on the side of the grads of US-based med school.
2) Generally speaking, the
medicine education in Poland is better than that in Italy. I hear here and there that Italian med students and residents are complaining about the lack of clinical exposure and the problems of the medical system in Italy. Also Italy is in South Europe, not West, and they suffered too from serious economical turmoils of EU. I observed some students had serious distress for their loans, because their school came to the brink of bankruptcy (Vita-Salute San Raffaele). The most important point for me was that the responsibles were inside, it wasnt because of the economical turmoil of the country at large, it was because of the illegal activities of the administration; even the top one commited suicide for that reason.
BUT dont think Poland is pure clean, it has its own loser-producing, money-sucker schools as well (especially spare yourself from HMI and its affiliates in Poland!!!).
2) If you are fluent in native language, the med programs in native languages are higher in quality, so I would prefer a native program. English programs are rather for profit because. Besides, for the same reason, the med programs in English have serious tuitions, while the native programs for the citizens are either for free or very low in tuition fees. I think its Bologna thing, which tries to create a EU pool in education.
In the rest of the post I focus on Polish schools, since I have considered the schools in Poland for myself, not in Italy.
3) The high-end schools in Poland are Jagiellonian, Gdansk and Warsaw. Among the English programs, only Jagiellonian has California Medical Board approval, but in native programs, you can see three of them all have that approval (though Gdansk too applied for CMB approval, but the process takes time):
http://www.mbc.ca.gov/applicant/schools_recognized.html#p
..and only Jagiellonian and Warsaw are in the First 400 of Times higher Education ranking:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/301-350.html
4) The only one which doesnt demand BS degree and MCAT, admits directly after high school
AND provides (tries to povide!) US system of education for American students(but in 6 years) who consider to turn back to US, have USMLEs and a residency in US, as far as I know, is Gdansk English program (but please dont forget that, it doesnt have CMB approval, and CMB demand you to have ALL of your education in an approved school, so if you think that you can start now in a school without CMB approval, and later when they get that approval it works for you too, you make a mistake, say if you start in Gdansk and if Gdansk gets approval after your first year there, after your graduation you will need to take your that first year all over again in an CMB approved program!)
5) All native programs are 6-year European system programs.
If you want to get in a specific point, please just ask.. and sorry once again.
By the way, if you have your residency in Italy [or in most of other parts of the world, (except only VERY expensive and very few, they say?)] , it wont count in US.
